Diffraction
by AngelDormais
Summary: Words, at their essence, bend into millions of pieces like lights within our minds. 50 prompt challenge, covering 2k3 to 2k12.
1. i-x

_A/N: I've never done a word prompts challenge for TMNT before, but I've always wanted to, and it seems like a great way to work around writers' block. This is a 50 prompt challenge done with words randomly generated from the Internet. Taking this one ten at a time, folks. Hope you enjoy! _

* * *

_**I. Table**_

Nourishment. A concern that forced the ribs through his coarse fur and painted ghostly pallors onto his sons' tender skin in the days of old. He would feel the warmth of their bodies, calculate the energy in their movements, and then scoop food into the trembling maws of the less-alive, leaving the more-alive trembling hungrily against the heaps of garbage.

He looks at the table, flowing with meats and fruits and his sons, all more alive than less. He can withstand the hollowness of hunger, but his sons must never starve again.

* * *

_**II. Thought**_

"No." Leonardo held the costume out in front of him as though trying to keep it as far away from his eyes as possible.

"Oh come on, it'll be really cool! We can have catchphrases, and sign autographs, and—" Michelangelo's excited suggestion was cut off by a lovely spandex outfit smacking into his face, golden underwear painted on the outside.

"I am _not_ joining the Justice Force as the _Terrapin Terror_."

"Jeez, Leo," Mikey grumbled as he pulled the costume off of his head. "It was just a thought."

* * *

_**III. Whisper**_

It's because of the coughing and screaming and crushed ribs that his voice comes as a ghost in the burning air. Hours pass and the call is unheeded; the whispers of dawn hang on the sky, and still words can only haunt the night.

* * *

_**IV. Dark**_

All his life, Michelangelo has been left in the dark about the skeletons hiding in his brothers' closets. He doesn't need to know why they are kept from him, or how long they have been there. He only hears their rattling bones at night and knows it keeps his brothers from sleep.

* * *

_**V. Enough**_

"Ugh...can...can you guys read me?"

"_I...nrgh...yeah, m'fine. Think I...I hit my head, Don's right here though—"_

"_Quiet, Raph. Leo, we got tossed south of the wreckage. Just follow the smoke, the whole plane's still on fire." _

"Yeah, I...I see it. Any survivors?"

"_I doubt it. The entire place lit up like it was doused in cheap gasoline."_

"Practically was."

"_Better them than the millions of civilians they were planning to smoke with those toys we found in their hold."_

"No kidding. You guys alive?"

"_I got away with a few scratches and bumps...but Raph's really been thrown for a loop, and Mikey's leg is broken in about three places."_

"But you're alive."

"_And stuck in the middle of nowhere."_

"But mostly alive. Take care of them, Donnie. See you in fifteen."

And he disconnects the link.

* * *

_**VI. Sandals**_

There is a place, far back in the closet of his room, where a small wooden box sits, marred and splintered and always locked tight. It has lain behind shelves of scrolls for years, long before the biting cold of the lair melted away into something warmer. It is a treasure—a thing from a past life, an incomplete memory that never came to pass.

One day, when he believes his infant sons are all asleep, he finds himself upon his knees in front of the box, grasping the contents to his chest like a weak old fool. When he hears the soft swish of air at his side and feels small hands circle his arm in innocent, concerned curiosity, he cannot bring himself to meet the inquisitive eyes of his youngest son.

Michelangelo looks at him, tilting his head. "Sensei, those are _girl_ shoes."

It is not a question, so Splinter does not feel compelled to answer. His child stares at the sandals in his hands, and then with the understanding of one who realizes the gravity of something without comprehending it, leans his head into his father's shoulder to join in his silent grief.

* * *

_**VII. Sole**_

"We did it," April says, a watery grin on her face.

The grave says nothing back. The silence is deafening, but it allows her eyes to trail over every letter carved into the rough plank of wood standing before her. She makes it to 'T' before something tightens in her throat so violently she thinks she may not be able to breathe for days. April swallows thickly and crouches down on one knee, shrugging off the backpack.

"You should have seen the guys, Master Splinter." Her voice cracks on the sixth word, but she ignores it, shuffling around inside the bag. "I couldn't believe my eyes. It was just like old times. And Donnie..."

Her fist closes around four strips of cloth. She pulls them from the bag—red, orange, purple, and blue, keepsakes from a time she'd almost lost within the haze of gunfire and screaming nights and cold, empty beds. April turns and begins knotting the masks around the walking stick jutting up from the cold ground, and with ashen trees bowed overhead and the silence pressing in at all sides and the moisture on her cheeks grounding her to the sodden earth, the whole world seems to watch as April O'Neil lays to rest her four precious brothers.

"You would have been so proud," she finishes softly.

A cool wind whispers through the bandana tails, and she closes her eyes to listen.

* * *

_**VIII. Explore**_

"To boldly go where no turtle has gone before!" Leo proclaims as he swerves and mimics his favorite Space heroes gesture of holding one finger up in the air and beaming into his audience.

Michelangelo lowers the comic book from his face, his snout crinkling in confusion. "You mean, like...New Jersey?"

Leo wilts faster than a lily in the Sahara. "No, Mikey," he grumbles, turning back to the television. "Even Captain Ryan wouldn't go_ there_."

* * *

**_IX. Dictionary_**

"You," Donatello hissed, furiously paging through the book, "are _lying_."

Michelangelo lazily spun a nunchaku in one hand, considerably more lackadaisical about this new information than his high-strung brother. A grin stretched his face as he watched Don pore through the pages. "Deny it all you want, Donnie-boy! The people have spoken!"

"Impossible," Don insisted under his breath. He suddenly stopped, breathing a soft _aha_ as he found the page he'd been looking for. His eyes stonily flickered up and down the columns.

Abruptly and with a shriek of frustration, he slammed the book shut and chucked it clear across the room.

"I can't believe they put '_bootylicious'_ in the _dictionary_!" He roared, arms flailing slightly as he stormed off in the direction of his lab.

Mikey called out after his retreating form, "Sorry, bro, but the American language is evolving!"

"Mikey," Leo admonished without looking up from his novel at the distant scream of rage, "stop enabling him."

* * *

**_X. Maternal  
_**

Sometimes the screaming of his own brain keeps him up at night, and it's all he can do not to join the caterwauling that echoes in his mind like screeching metal lost in an endless maze of caverns. He climbs topside and runs, listening to the squealing tires and midnight sirens, every noise inside and out building to an explosion in his skull.

At two in the morning he crawls through the first story of Second Time Around, climbs the stairwell leading up to her apartment above, and tucks himself into the corner, clenching his eyes in the silence until the brain-noise fades away into the bleak darkness of sleep.

When he awakes to the dim gray light filtering in through a window high above, there's a blanket pulled over his shell and a note on the floor, teasing his ninja skills and inviting him inside for toast.

_And next time_, the note also says, written in April's grand, swirly handwriting, _just knock on my bedroom window, tough guy._


	2. xi-xx

_A/N:Thank you for the lovely reviews! Just to warn you, from here on out the prompts probably won't be as lengthy as the first ten, which I wrote quite some time ago. Also, I might have accidentally slipped some 2k7 into this set. Whoops!_

_In addition, I sincerely apologize for any missing pagebreaks. I've been tearing my hair out trying to get them working in FFnet's HTML editor, but they seriously just won't cooperate sometimes. Sigh._

* * *

_xi. conference_

"彼は鼻の中に鼻くそを持っています。我々は彼に言うべきか？" Mikey asked.

Horrified, Donatello glanced at Casey, his eyes widening. "ええと...彼はあなたの友人、" he muttered, glancing at his older brother.

"我々は彼の乳母ではありません," Raph replied brusquely, not even looking up from the task of wrapping his knuckles.

Leo looked uncomfortable about the entire situation. "彼の日付は10分である。彼がそのように行くことができない。"

With a groan Casey threw his arms into the air. "How am I supposed to keep up with you guys when you're all speakin' _Mandarin Vietnamese _or somethin'?!"

They all paused, sending him sheepish looks—with the exception of Raphael, who finally glanced up at him with a grin. "とんちき。"

* * *

_xii. intriguing _

"Fascinating," Donatello murmured, clicking the end of his forceps together. He pulled the goggles down over his eyes and switched on the built-in light, adjusting it to shine out into the object of interest.

Raphael hissed groggily as his brother stretched his arm out and carefully positioned the forceps over a dart lodged into the skin. "Have I ever mentioned that I _hate_ it when you say that?"

* * *

_xiii. innate_

Flashes of purple and green swirl above in dust-colored fragments of light, the sky pitching forward, pressing in, drowning him with stars. He's flat on his shell and there's pressure on his abdomen. His fists close emptily over damp asphalt. Something raw coils in his stomach like millions of glass-edged shards, and the sky fills his lungs until he can feel the stars in his throat. The weight on his abdomen shifts onto his chest, purple streaks leaning overhead. Donatello is screaming at him.

He tries to say 'I love you'; it comes out as, "I'm sorry."

* * *

_xiv. shampoo_

Irma adores April. She honestly does. She just isn't entirely sure how to tell her that the shampoo she uses smells a little bit like it was left in the sewers for a few weeks.

* * *

_xv. scream  
_

one is a test of the darkness.

two is a bestial cry

three is a candle, flickering flame

four is permission to die.

* * *

_xvi. letter_

_I'll be home soon._

_-L_

* * *

_xvii. soar_

Michelangelo saves all of the letters his brother sends from Central America. They're piled in a neat stack on his shelf, the one where only the most venerated mint-condition issues of Space Force are kept. Don and Raph used to tease him about it—better make sure you hand those to Splinter before Leo gets back, or he'll think you have an older brother complex.

They haven't teased him ever since they stopped being sure he'd get back at all.

On the eve of the first-year anniversary of Leo's departure, Michelangelo takes all of the letters and goes topside. He climbs a building near the wharf, where he can see the ocean from the rooftops, and with a hot pressure behind his eyes, he takes the topmost letter from the stack and folds it into a paper airplane.

Michelangelo throws it out over the edge, where the wind quickly carries it out into the sea.

He keeps the rest.

* * *

_xviii. padlock  
_

In a dizzying rush of irrelevance, Raphael was suddenly thankful that _he_ hadn't been the one shut into a metal chest and buried alive, considering he was the fastest lockpicker out of them all.

* * *

_xix. sugar_

"Coffee, at its best, is bittersweet," Mikey had nasally announced, stirring his mug with a plastic spoon.

Donatello had given him the silent treatment after that until he'd apologized.

* * *

_xx. smile_

The turtles had told her that they didn't mind if she had a conventional wedding with her human friends and family. They'd find _some_ way to attend, they'd assured her, and she damn well believed it—in fact, she suspected they just wanted an excuse to find cool hiding places in a giant cathedral. Mikey had practically admitted to as much.

"But then," she asked, feigning innocence as she looked around the table, "who would walk me down the aisle?"

Her eyes settled upon Splinter, who gripped the mug of tea in his hands in immediate understanding. The room went silent as his whiskers twitched.

The soft grin that stretched his old, weathered muzzle was all the reasoning April needed to make her decision.


	3. xxi-xxx

_xxi. pacifism_

"Stop it, Raph!"

Ronny couldn't believe it. There was a giant meat slab of an arm grinding his windpipe into chalk, and the red mutant freak it belonged to couldn't even be bothered to _look_ at him. Instead he was bickering with his nasty little purple-wearing friend, who just stood there shuffling around in a duffel bag.

"Are you _crazy_, Don? Did you miss the part where knife-boy here just tried to cut you a new breathin' hole?" The red one spat, shoving his bulk against Ronny's chest.

"I'm fine!" The other one snapped. He pulled a square of gauze out of his bag and pressed it into the side of his bleeding scalp, then pointed to Ronny, who scrabbled feebly at Red's grip. "Can't you see he's had enough?"

Red snarled, his sharp gaze swerving to pin Ronny with a calculating look. After a heartbeat, his weight finally shifted away, unpinning Ronny's arms from the wall. "You're lucky Donnie's such a bleedin'-"

_Now._ Heart pounding in his ears, Ronny slid a second jack knife from his jacket sleeve and plunged it into the soft flesh at Red's side. With a sound of surprise that choked off into something wet at the end, the mutant released his grip on Ronny and stumbled to the right, his huge hands grasping clumsily at the wound. An angry, pained growl burbled in his throat when they came away slicked with red.

"_Raph!_" howled a voice to Ronny's left, followed by a cry of utter fury, and he barely had time to turn and catch a flash of purple before a wooden staff cracked into his skull at—quite literally—breakneck speeds.

––

_xxii. carnic_

She has only felt the texture of their skin in brushes against her own. It doesn't occur to her, really, that she's never _felt_ them, never taken the time to explore the thing that makes them so unique and so isolated from everything she knew as normal until they blazed into her life like four bodies of living fire. Perhaps it doesn't matter, she thinks; they are who they are, and she loves them all the same.

But then she wonders if loving them _despite_ their mutant heritage is really what she wants, and there's a sick twist inside her chest that immediately serves as her answer.

One day she visits the lair with a purpose in mind, and only Leonardo is there to greet her. She hadn't really put thought into who she wanted it to be, but she's glad it's him, in a way. It seems right. He's wearing a mild smile when he invites her inside, polite and warm as always, but only now does she notice the way he carefully avoids touching her exposed shoulders as she's ushered inside.

"Leo," she says to him after he puts the kettle on for tea, grabbing the marginal scute over his right shoulder. It's rough and hard, like sandstone. (But that she already knew.) Leonardo turns to her, and she commands, "Give me your arm."

Leo's only response is a flash of curiosity through his dark eyes. After a moment of hesitation, he wordlessly complies.

She takes his arm gently, pinching at the elbow and wrist and bringing it closer to herself. She runs her thumb over the green flesh at the inner elbow; lifts her hand, her touch softly ghosting down the length of his forearm. The skin is leathery, _almost_ scaly, but the uneven texture feels more like goosebumps beneath her hand.

Then she bends his arm upwards at the elbow, sliding one palm gently over the back of his hand and spreading his thick fingers wide. She hears the breath catch in his throat as she pushes her hand slowly over his wrist, up his palm, and ends with their hands spread against each other, her extra fingers pushed together to match his three digits.

Leo is completely silent. His eyes catch hers, caught somewhere between complete understanding and terrible fear.

April lifts her hand away from his. "Definitely a turtle," she says with a chuckle, and flicks one of his bandana tails into his face.

He smiles at her with something new in his expression, and it almost _hurts_ how much she loves him, scales and all.

––

_xxiii. vapor_

Donatello places the lid upside-down on the pot. "And then you just wait. One gallon usually takes about four hours to fully distill, but there are always factors you have to take into consideration, like altitude, the contaminants in the water, things like that. I'll give you a list. There's probably no harm in letting it sit while you do other things, but..."

Leonardo watches his brother prattle on in silence, arms crossed. They're standing in his lab with a pot and a fire, and his brother is teaching him how to do something they all learned about before they knew their times tables (well, except for Don himself, probably). His eyes travel to the pot boiling on the counter, and then to the floor, where various textbooks lie askew; as though they'd been swept off in a hurry. The corner of his mouth tugs down.

"...be best if you kept at least two flasks of clean water at all times. Preferably more. You never know when—Leo? Are you listening?"

He turns to see his brother staring at him, his face haloed by a ring of warm light from the fire in the otherwise dark room. Leonardo sighs, turns to lean on the counter with both arms. He stares at the boiling pot. He knows his brother is just trying to help, but...

"I already know how to distill water, Don." It's a bit harsher than he meant it to be; his brother flinches, eyes growing quiet. Leonardo wonders when he lost the ability to be patient even for Donatello, and hates himself all the more.

"I know," Don mutters. "I'm not trying to insult you, honest. It's just... Master Splinter didn't say how long you'll be gone, or even where _exactly_ you're supposed to find what you'll be looking for. It's a big world out there, Leo. And I just want to make sure you..."

He trails off, staring at the pot with an unreadable expression. Leonardo knows his poor brother—cursed with a heart that loves far too much to express itself in words and a mind that moves far too quickly to parse down everything he wants to say. Donatello has always spoken in demonstrations of technological and scientific wonders; things turned by heart and mind into something that does for his family what words never could. In a way, the very lives they lead are products themselves of Donatello's love; shiny toys and hover-boards come from the same place where security systems and shell cell trackers do, in the end.

Faced with his oldest brother's departure, Don is saying goodbye and good luck in the only way he knows how. But for some reason... it's not enough. Not this time. And he's scrambling to make both ends meet.

"I will," Leonardo promises.

Usually that's all it takes, too. But the balance is thrown off _(because of him),_ so it's no great surprise when his brother turns with a gaze like molten snow.

"Will you really, Leo?"

Anger and shame spike in his chest; fills his lungs until he's breathing tacks. How far he must have fallen in his family's eyes, that his word now means nothing to the brother who once trusted him through every one of his flaws. No wonder he's being sent away. Half of him is amazed that Donatello is even still bothering with him, if not out of a sense of obligation. _(the other half knows it's because he loves far too much.)_

He lifts the lid from the pot, dewy droplets sliding down the convex curve of metal. The steam floats into the air in front of his face, dispersing and scattering into the darkness.

"Yes."

No. He wishes he could disappear, too.

––

_xxiv. selfishne__ss_

You try not to think about the way your brother's eyes fall; the tunnel is dark and there's oily, half burnt-out ceiling lights with ropey wires and moths tapping against the grimy glass bulbs. _tap tap tap_, louder than the hammering blood in your skull. Louder than the sound of your brother's quietly shattering eyes.

"I don't need you," you repeat, maybe for posterity. Maybe because it's all you have to say. It's all you've ever had to say, but the lies were paper-thin and fragile like moth wings. Roasted gold in the light. _tap tap tap. you're burning alive. _

Your shoulders hardly brush together as you storm past. It pulls him wide open, but his shards end up cutting your feet, piece by piece._  
_

––

_xxv. frail_

Dark figures dancing on rice paper walls. The room is warm, oppressively so, even though the only source of heat is a small, yellow candle that flickers and writhes with every ghost of air trailing from his mouth. Wax pools on the floor, and he wants to clean it up. But his bones creak like ancient metal in his joints whenever he tries to lift the blankets from his body.

Something cool passes over the slick fur of his forehead. His eyes crack open and catch flashes of purple interposed over olive-green. _Ah_. His gentlest son, dark eyes squinted in worry as he replaces a cool cloth over his head.

Splinter slowly pulls up a hand from the blanket and grasps Donatello's wrist. His son stiffens in surprise, yet all Splinter does is murmur words of love and praise—words he speaks so rarely to any of his sons. Frailty has shaped clarity, and only beneath the dark glow of fever can he see how much they all crave his warmth.

It seems incomplex. Warmth, right now, is all he has to give.

––

_xxvi. path_

Four roads are woven into the ground before him. A burn, the dust, the dark, a light. Peace rings like a bell in the distance, reaching down with starry wings.

He turns and treads the backwards path. More important are the ones he left behind.

––

_xxvii sweetness_

Life at best is bittersweet, his mind reminds him, and it's in his voice because the little piece of paper is folded into a square and tucked into the sentimental drawer where his first physics book and purple head scarf are, and he hasn't looked at it in years. He wants to reach in and strangle himself, burn everything to the ground, but his brain is going twenty miles a second and it feels like he's underwater and everything is moving like a broken film strip and

he bends over his brother's cold chest, gripping the edges of his plastron until the blood cakes his fingers and face. Nothing is bitter, or sweet. Metallic. It's all death is.

––

_xxviii. impenetrability_

One crack in his shell, a broken leg, and a concussion, and even with all of his brothers' fretting, Michelangelo still manages to laugh off his injuries. Raph, incoherent with fury, takes off topside the moment he knows his baby brother will be okay, ready to extract vengeance on every Purple Dragon he can find for nearly killing the youngest member of the family.

Leo shoots off after him, leaving only Don, who watches his older brothers depart with dark, red eyes.

"Don," Mikey croaks out. His brother turns to look at him, frowning. "They'll... be fine, bro. Leo'll... take care of 'im." He groans, trying to squirm under Don's firm grip at the fire in his spine. "Hope Raph gets a couple first, though."

Donatello sighs, gently pushing up Mikey's bandana with his thumb to study the bruises dotting the space where his freckles should be.

"I don't know how you do it, Mikey," Don murmurs, voice tight with worry. Mike opens his mouth, and then Don quickly adds, "If you start trying to sing _Titanium_, I'm going to add one more bruise to your collection."

Mikey's mouth snaps shut, and Donatello's smile gains a little more sincerity at the edges.

––

_xxix. nullification_

There came a time when the horror stories of humans and their dark, cruel world no longer affected his children; no longer kept them up at night, listening to the subway tunnels rattling and peering through sewer grates at passing shadows and dark city lights.

Then came the time when he realized that _he_ had been the cruel one, and that his sons would find a way to live in this world even still.

Then it was he who began to lose sleep.

––

_xxx. imminence_

Don once tried to figure out their lifespans. Red-eared sliders lived only around twenty years or so, but their speed of maturation seemed to more closely mirror that of a human's. Even so, he'd said in that shifty, neurotic way he does when he's been awake for thirty hours and living exclusively on caffeine, it wouldn't hurt to have a rough outline.

Soon enough, Master Splinter forbade the research. It was unhealthy for Donatello to pursue such dark unknowables with such obsession, he'd asserted, his whiskers twitching in hard concern. Life was unpredictable, indefinable, and _always_ far too short. Above all, it was something to be savored—not studied.

Reluctantly, Don had sealed his notes away in a manila folder and banished them to the filing cabinet of abandoned projects. But sometimes, during long nights and caffeine rushes, he would dig them back out, flip through the pages, and wonder why he had been forbidden from something so important.

Then, at the age of nineteen, Raphael died of a gunshot wound from one lucky punk.

Donatello never looked at them (or wondered why) again.

* * *

_A/N: WOW I'm so sorry, I don't know why they all ended up so sad. Guess I'll call this the Decangst chapter. And I don't know why I always pick on poor Don, either; isn't SAINW enough?_

_(never.)_

_Might have a whole chapter of lighthearted ones to balance this one off. Either way, hope you enjoyed!_


End file.
